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September 12, 2018How to Finish Your Damn Book - For Beginners!
I often joke that writing a novel is like running a marathon---only no one bothers to tell you what the route is. When the gun goes off, you’re just supposed to head off in whatever direction you think ...
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September 13, 2019The Unbearable Lightness of Being Between Writing Projects
Lately, I’ve felt a bit unmoored. For the last 6 years, I’ve organized my spare time around working on my novel. I’ve either been working on it or worrying about not having time to work on it, or ...
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May 24, 2017Happy Birthday, Marian Engel!
Today is the eighty-fourth birthday of Marian Engel, or it would be, had the novelist not died of cancer in 1985. Now, instead of a person, she is a name, survived like all people by her family and friends, ...
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January 30, 2019My Reading Year: What I Learned from Reading 275 Books in 365 Days
The other day I told a friend that I'd read 275 books in 2018 and he responded by laughing and declaring emphatically, "That's a reading year!"I think that's an excellent way to describe my past year. ...
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December 27, 2017Reading Books While Desperately Avoiding Loneliness
There was a tree surrounded by countless of its kind, but also all alone, as the only one alive. Its nearby kin debarked and digested, steamed into slop, robbed of their resin and lignin, cleaned, screened, ...
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May 22, 2022
The Reasons I Write
I can think of many reasons why I should not write. The pay is terrible. The hours, though flexible, are insufferably long (i.e., even when I stop doing writing, I am thinking about writing). It can be ...
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February 02, 2021Why We Need to Question “Hobbies” in the Pandemic
On a rainy Thursday morning at the end of January 2021, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling for far too long... I couldn’t remember what I had done in 2020. I remember the past couple of years clearly: ...
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November 02, 20172017 Weston Prize Finalists on the Value of Non-Fiction: "Canada Needs to Know its Stories"
The jurors for this year's Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction (Susan Harada, Arno Kopecky, and Siobhan Roberts) have set themselves a very difficult task. This year's shortlist is ...
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January 16, 2025Owen Sound Author Richard J. Thomas Tells the Fascinating Story of the King's Royal Hotel and the Balmy Beach Pavilion
Just north of Owen Sound, and shortly after the turn of the 20th Century, the mighty King's Royal Hotel was built. It had been intended to rival the finest resorts in the world, but by 1914 this once ...
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January 19, 2018Ele Pawelski on the Most Surprising, Awkward, and Delightful Parts of Publishing for the First Time
Ele Pawelski's debut novella, The Finest Supermarket in Kabul (Quattro Books), follows three characters in the aftermath of an explosion at the titular shop - a real event that occurred in 2011. Merza ...
